When I tell people I’m celebrating my 15-year wedding anniversary this summer, the reaction is always the same: surprise, confusion, and a look that tells me they are silently doing math on my age. I then tell them I got married at 20, three months before my 21st birthday. I would never recommend it. And yet.

There is a version of this story that looks like a fairy tale. My husband and I met young (I was 18 and he was 22), and we spent our 20s traveling, living abroad, and then settling down in Southern California with our dog. We just bought a house near the beach and have a one-year-old daughter who is quite possibly the most smiley baby on earth. From the outside, the narrative arc is clean, enviable. But I’ve been married long enough to know that the outside of any marriage tells you almost nothing about what’s actually inside it, and that the gap between those two things is where the real story lives.

Here’s what marriage actually looks like, fifteen years in.

It looks like a huge fight on a Tuesday because we’re buying a house, he’s a firefighter responding to accidents on the side of the highway, and I’m at my desk, drowning in inspection reports. Every time we get on the phone, we bicker because neither of us has time or bandwidth, and the administrative weight keeps landing on me. It looks like hanging up frustrated, twice — no, four times. And then, late in the afternoon, an iced coffee from my favorite coffee shop arrives at the front door. Suddenly, I feel seen.

It looks like lying awake at the end of the night, too tired to be touched, the warmth of his breath somehow irritating instead of soothing, and wondering what that says about me, about us. It looks like scrolling past some couple on social media and feeling the slow creep of comparison, the intrusive thought that asks whether what we have measures up. It looks like intimacy that has to be chosen, again and again, because I’m postpartum and exhausted (and when does libido come back?). Some nights, the most intimate thing we do is let our toes touch under the covers.

But here’s what else it looks like.

It looks like my husband peeling and feeding me orange slices while I labored with our daughter, and the two of us belly laughing as I shuffled around with the IV pole, my gown exposing my butt in full fluorescent-lit absurdity. It looks like holding hands as an instinct, like catching his eye from across a room and feeling my whole body settle.

And it looks like the vet’s office, holding our dog as she took her last breath. We had brought her home a few months after getting married, and she made it to thirteen. My husband doesn’t like dogs, and we fought about it for years, but he knew how much she meant to me, especially during the years of infertility. She made it to see the end of that chapter and held on just long enough to meet our daughter. 

My husband and I have done so much growing up in the past 15 years — separately, and side by side. While most people spend their twenties figuring out who they are, we did it alongside another person. It changed the shape of who we became, to the point that I don’t know where I end and where the life we’ve created together begins anymore. And that feels both beautiful and tender.

There is a framed photo on my desk from the night before our IVF transfer. It’s an overexposed selfie taken on my phone after a few glasses of wine as we wandered the beach late at night. We look so light and happy in it. Our faces blur together. When I look at that photo, I see two people who continue to choose each other, even on the days when it feels impossible.

If I were writing vows today, I think I would try to say that.

I would say: Marriage is nothing like I expected, and it has broken me open and saved me more times than I can count.

I would say: There are moments you still feel like a mystery to me, even now, and that used to scare me, but I’ve learned to trust that we will keep finding our way back to one another.

I would say: You see me when other people don’t. And when I change, and I keep changing, you show up to watch me grow. And you grow alongside me.

I would say: How lucky are we to have found this kind of love so early on?

Kayti Christian is a Senior Content Strategist at The Good Trade. With an MFA in Nonfiction Creative Writing, her work has appeared in TODAY, Shondaland, and The New York Times. Since 2017, Kayti has been uncovering and reviewing the best sustainable home brands and wellness products. Her personal journey through four years of fertility treatments has inspired her to write extensively about women’s healthcare and reproductive access. Beyond her work at The Good Trade, Kayti is the creator of Feelings Not Aside, a Substack newsletter with 6,000 subscribers, and the cohost of the FriedEggs Podcast, which delves into IVF and infertility.